Fretting, asking, and begging isn’t a plan: the Arrington kerfuffle and women in tech

Success in Silicon Valley, most would agree, is more merit driven than almost any other place in the world. It doesn’t matter how old you are, what sex you are, what politics you support or what color you are…. Statistically speaking women have a huge advantage as entrepreneurs.

Part of changing the ratio is just changing awareness, so that the next time Techcrunch is planning a Techcrunch Disrupt, they won’t be able to not see the overwhelming maleness of it.

I thought it was a great read. But not everybody agreed.

Every damn time we have a conference we fret over how we can find women to fill speaking slots. We ask our friends and contacts for suggestions. We beg women to come and speak. Where do we end up? With about 10% of our speakers as women.

If you really want to make progress, treat it the way you would any other business problem you take seriously. Set goals, put a plan together, hire good people to help you, and do some real outreach. Work with organizations like Change The Ratio, Women Who Tech, Anita Borg Institute, GeekFeminism, BlogHer, Fem2pt0, TechMavens, Women 2.0, ASTIA and so on. Invite them to guest post regularly on TechCrunch. Go to their events. Pay a diversity consultant and invest in their recommendations. Oh and while you’re at it please work on race, age, and other biases in TechCrunch and your other enterprises.

Or not. It’s up to you, of course. But if you ignore all this input and keep acting defensive, don’t expect people to see you as taking diversity seriously.

There’s plenty more privilege (along with some sexism and misogyny) in the comment thread. More positively there’s some good stuff as well, including perspectives from Michelle Lee of Mamabread, Michelle Greer, LToTheWolf, Cindy Gallop of If We Ran the World, and many others. Women and allies are underrepresented in the thread but more than holding their own 🙂 There’s also a brief appearance from Fred Wilson, and a great riposte by self-described angry feminist Millercan, who responds to a clueless comment about meritocracy with:

have been in tech (my guess) since before you were in kindergarten. i’ve been rewarded based on merit. but never as well as men who actually shipped shitty products, or took out 16 million organizations with narcissistic behavior.

That said, Arrington’s position has gotten some support, too. Here’s what the all-male team at Charles River Ventures has to say on Twitter

I think of articles like this as a fascinating snapshot of how privilege, combined with the “guys talking to guys who talk about guys” cliquing behavior, leads to a remarkably convenient blind spot for Arrington — as well as a lot of his readers, and so many other privileged white guys.

At the same time, though, it’s also a great sign of the momentum that the women-in-technology networks and their allies are making. The steady coverage in Fast Company, Mercury News, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other high profile sites, along with the overwhelming evidence, increases the pressure on the “objective” defenders of the status quo. It’s getting harder and harder to deny there’s a problem, and that the advantages moving ahead will go to those who address it most quickly.

So I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot more “anxious masculinity under threat” blog posts.

* In fact, most don’t agree. Michael presumably knows the data that’s been published in TechCrunch and elsewhere about the superior performance of women-run startup. And yet less than 10% of the successes are by women. Unless you’re sexist enough to believe that women don’t want to run companies or are for some reason less qualified, there’s no way to reconcile this a belief that Silicon Valley is a meritocracy — let alone that women have systemic advantages.

Posted by jon on Sunday, August 29th, 2010, at 10:13 am, and filed under Uncategorized.

I was particularly incensed by this rather arrogant turn of phrase in Arrington’s article:

“It doesn’t matter how old you are, what sex you are, what politics you support or what color you are. If your idea rocks and you can execute, you can change the world and/or get really, stinking rich.”

It very much *does* matter what politics you support. Silicon Valley is all about tax breaks for Silicon Valley, more H1B visas to bring in foreign workers, etc.

In short, Silicon Valley seems to me to be far more disconnected from Main Street than Wall Street *ever* was! It is “trickle-down economics” at its most blatant. It is elitist, sexist, ageist and for the most part totally blind to the environmental impact of IT. Only two things seem to matter in Silicon Valley – code and dollars.

Thanks for including my Tweet. Of course from my perspective the other elephant in the room is the use of the word women which will typically include white women but not specific women of color and particularly black women. If we looked at those numbers would we find any companies? Not everyone is a coder or developer, has a computer science or engineering degree. Some of us are idea generators. How do we connect with those who can help facilitate and implement our visions – as well as fund them?

Totally agreed, Ed and Faith. Age and race biases are huge issues as well — and it’s a particularly bad situation for women of color.

Ed, this isn’t really new behavior from Silicon Valley. Paulina Borsook’s Cyberselfish from the 1990s describes it very recognizably. And of course it’s not just the Valley and it’s not just high tech; a lot of other locations and industries and locations are worse.

Faith, excellent point about the need to connect people with different skills. “Techie elitism” is yet another dimension of self-reinforcing privilege. You can really see it on places like Hacker News; Y Combinator and other tech incubators like TechStars are virtually impossible for anybody other than developers to get involved in unless they’re already part of a team.

In the Seattle area, the Northwest Entrepeneurs’ Network and events like Startup Weekend fill this gap to some extent (although it’s still a challenge). Are some similar organizations where you live?

I’ve lived in San Francisco for a number of years and have to admit I was remiss in seeking out all of the networking opportunities I should have. I’m temporarily on the East Coast and aside from She’s Geeky, Anita Borg, Women Who Tech, Women 2.0 ,etc I’m not aware of specific organizations that work to facilitate idea generators with those with the technical skills. That doesn’t mean there aren’t any though. If anyone has any recommendations please pass them along. It’s these conversations that will help connect us.

I wasn’t going to get in this whole debate as I have work to do, but the notion that there is no discrimination against women in tech because some women have made it was just as off-base as the idea there is no racism because Obama is president. But you put it much better in two words. Hurray you!

Should conference organizers go out of their way to recruit diversity speakers when they already have great speakers pro-actively applying to speak? I think that any discussion (at a conference or in a bar) is more interesting when there are different view points, and this is one of the major reasons that diversity (in thought, gender, etc) is important.

I would love to see some information on the results of speaker submissions for conferences and how those match up with the outcomes. Is there disparity between the applications percentages and the speakers percentages?

My response is still in moderation on Fast Company; here it is, with some cleaned-up formatting:

Great points Krista (and great article Allyson). I co-chaired the 20th ACM Computers, Freedom, and Privacy (CFP) earlier this year, and we decided to make diversity an explicit goal. So I spent a chunk of time looking at what other conferences are doing. My impression is that it’s exactly as you say: even when people want diversity, they’re not investing the effort to make it happen. As I said in my response to Arrington, fretting, asking, and begging isn’t a plan.

Totally agreed about the value of the different perspectives. I was at a privacy conference in 2009 which had panels like “Five middle-aged white guys on the future of privacy” and “Four middle-aged white guys on airport profiling”. Sigh.

No question that it can be challenging to get a diverse set of speakers but it’s certainly worth doing.

“Every damn time we have a conference we fret over how we can find women to fill speaking slots. We ask our friends and contacts for suggestions. We beg women to come and speak. Where do we end up? With about 10% of our speakers as women.”

This statement is SUCH a lie. I personally have known some of the TC folks for years and have never seen one request, let alone “begging” and they still are unable to find them. Even Sarah Lacy, supposedly a woman in tech – have never once seen her reaching out to her network.

Thanks Susan … alas when you’re used to privilege, and are surrounded by other privileged people, it’s hard to see how much you benefit from it.

And thanks Mike, too! My views of the TechCrunch universe are strictly from the outside (I don’t know any of the people there, so my closest contact is once seeing Arrington speak — on an all-male panel 🙂 ) so it’s always great to hear from those with closer contacts.

Both from a gender equity and a media perspective, there are some big names here. NCWIT is the National Council on Women in Technology, and the excellent post by Jamelle Bouie they’re tweeting showed up on TAPPED, a high-profile political blog. Terri O. blogs at Geek Feminism. Julia Angwin is at the Wall Street Journal (that’s mainstream media, right) and Elizabeth Stark wrote a great piece earlier this year for the Huffington Post? Sharon Vosmek runs Astia, Rachel Sklar’s retweeting something from Women 2.0, and of course Shelley Powers is the author of the 2005 classics Guys don’t link and When We Are Needed.

Angie Chang of Women 2.0 reminded me that I hadn’t mentioned Astia, led by Sharon Vosmek, and added:

Astia hosted a great summit — the “We Own It Summit” in June 2010 — which was not whining and man-hating, but fact-sharing and goal-setting. We came out of the summit armed with the current statistics and studies on women, founding companies, and venture capital. The summit produced solid ideas for growth, goals for increasing the number of female founders, women investors, et al. — and metrics to measure our goals against.

It is only due to the growing pressure that someone such as himself would feel compelled to defend himself in this matter—even if it was only due to a moment of extreme frustration that got the best of him. The cat’s out of the bag now, though, that’s for sure….

Here was my response:

Andrea, excellent point. ASTIA certainly should be on any short-list of organizations working in this area — we’ll add it to the list. Great to hear about the summit, and it’s exactly as you say: when you’re armed with the statistics and have specific goals, it’s a lot easier to make progress.

Harry, from Arrington’s perspective, he’s clearly frustrated that he’s not getting any credit for what he has done. TechCrunch is a lot more diverse now than it used to be, with a female CEO and two female senior editors — props to him. And yet even so people keep busting his chops … meanwhile Fred Wilson’s getting all kinds of positive attention!

Whatever his mix of emotions when he wrote it, though, he did say what he thought, and the resulting dialog is hopefully useful.

Sarah Lacy‘s certainly right that some other women share Arrington’s views. Leah Culver strikes a similar chord in The Daily Beast:

If you can look past his controversial tone, he’s got a good point: Less words, more action….

As women, in order to be part of the tech community, we need to criticize less. Blaming other members of the community (especially men) provokes a knee-jerk defense and doesn’t help solve the problem. Instead we need to congratulate more women on their accomplishments and praise those who helped them along the way.

No question about the importance of recognizing and congratulating women on their accomplishments. But Rachel Sklar’s point that kicked off the whole debate is that TechCrunch Disrupt hasn’t been recognizing women, and I think this applies to TechCrunch in general.

The list of New York City mentors includes Foursquare founders Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai, Tumblr founder David Karp, VC Fred Wilson, Hunch founder and seed investor Chris Dixon, Roger Ehrenberg of IA Ventures, StockTwits CEO Howard Lindzon, Boxee CEO Avner Ronen, BuzzFeed president Jon Steinberg, and Hot Potato founder Justin Shaffer. Jeff Clavier and Dave McClure snuck in there as well, even though they live in California.

And y’know, I don’t think it’s “blaming” anybody to point that out. If mentioning this provokes knee-jerk defensiveness, that reflects a lack of awareness and double-standards. Like I said above, I understand why he’s frustrated about not getting credit for hiring women at TechCrunch, but that’s only one aspect of gender equity. He doesn’t sugarcoat his criticism of others (and in fact is known for his lack of diplomacy). He should expect to be treated similarly.

Words are actions. They’re not the only kind of actions, of course; I’m working on a post called A few things you can do for the Northwest Entrepeneurs’ Network’s blog with a bunch of suggestions and links to more. [Feedback welcome!] But that doesn’t decrease the importance of words.

So rather than looking it it as complaining, I think it’s extremely valuable to hold well-intentioned privileged people in power accountable and evaluate them on the same criteria they apply to others. And all the excellent blog posts and tweets on this subject help the people who are working towards change understand each others’ positions, and — if they want to — work together to change things.

Quoted directly from the article:
“The switch to blind auditions can explain between 30 percent and 55 percent of the increase in the proportion female among new hires and between 25 percent and 46 percent of the increase in the percentage female in the orchestras from 1970 to 1996,” the economists write. The study notes that the surge of women in symphony orchestras has occurred despite the fact that the number of positions is highly fixed and turnover is slow.

Now, whenever I screen resumes, I ask the recruiter to black out any demographic information from the resume itself: name, age, gender, country of origin. The first time I did this experiment, I felt a strange feeling of vertigo while reading the resume. “Who is this guy?” I had a hard time forming a visual image, which made it harder to try and compare each candidate to the successful people I’d worked with in the past. It was an uncomfortable feeling, which instantly revealed just how much I’d been relying on surface qualities when screening resumes before – even when I thought I was being 100% meritocratic. And, much to my surprise (and embarrassment), the kinds of people I started phone-screening changed immediately.

And yet, when I suggest this practice to hiring managers and recruiters alike, they rarely do it. Hiring managers say, “the recruiter would never go for it” while recruiters say, “the hiring manager won’t accept it.” What I think we’re really saying is: “I don’t want to know if I am biased.”

jon

PS: At Qworky, we interviewed several candidates via online chat — which is a good way of approximating this.

I’m not a whiner or complainer (except over a glass of wine with friends). I’m a doer. I’m an instigator. I’m an innovator. I’m a leader. I create things, build things, write things. Make things happen.

I cannot believe we are STILL having the EXACT SAME CONVERSATIONS today as we were in 1995 when women made up 10% of the female population, and I was only one of a handful of women helming a tech startup….

You are part of the problem, Michael Arrington. You are a successful, young, white male who has the ear and eye of many powerful men in the tech industry, and you – like too many of them – have sat on the sidelines over the years scratching your heads or scratching your balls. Not many of you have taken positive actions to make positive changes in the system to create more opportunity for ANYONE who is not white and male.

As my friends know, I try to avoid talking about myself*, but since Michael asked so nicely, I will.

To start with I do a lot of mentoring and advising. In fact part of the reason it took me a while to respond is that I had meetings with Shasta Willson (aka @codeamazon) about her new venture Litsam Press, and Miller Canning (aka @millercan), who I connected with after quoting her in this post and was looking for some feedback on what she’s working on. It’s not glamorous but makes a big difference. And my startup Qworky has an extremely diverse team; one of our three co-founders is a woman, and so is the majority of the world’s best advisory board and our incredible community. Plus I’m volunteering with the Northwest Entrepeneurs’ Network and have been leading outreach to women for this fall’s First Look Forum.

Moving beyond entrepeneurs to women in technology more generally, in my last 18 months at Microsoft I led the Ad Astra grassroots strategy/culture change project, which among other accomplishments increased women’s participation in innovations from an initial 5-10% to 25-30% [the population density of Microsoft]. In the political area, I co-founded #p2 (the largest progressive hashtag on Twitter) with Tracy Viselli, specifically with a goal of increasing participation by women. After two years of looking at diversity on the program committee, I co-chaired the ACM Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference, and we wound up with 37% women speakers.

Oh yeah and I blog a lot about it too, here and in comments on places like Restructure and Geek Feminism. As I said earlier in this thread, words are actions. I think there’s a lot of value in keeping snapshorts of the biases against women, people of color, and other marginalized groups, challenging privilege when I see it, and recognizing and linking to the women who take leadership in these and other areas.

Anyhow, enough about me.

Michael, you certainly deserve credit for improving diversity in TechCrunch’s management and employees and giving Vivek a platform for his guest posts. What else are you doing to help women in technology?

Update, September 6: The links Arrington’s talking about are to TechCrunch stories by Evelyn Rusli and Alexia Tsotis on women-oriented events. I tweeted back to him asking for statistics on what percentage of TechCrunch stories are about women but he didn’t reply. Oh well.

So in this case, it’s not just privilege or ignorance that I find so appalling. It’s Arrington’s disdain. Since writing the post, he has gone on and on and on and on about women in technology — belittling those who’ve written posts challenging him, belittling the experiences and analyses of those who’ve disagreed, challenging the credentials and the achievements of people working to address gender disparities, acting as the outrage and the frustration is really just a big joke.

Yeah really. Gayle Laakmann, one of Qworky’s excellent advisors, weighs in as well, with Blame Men — And Women

There’s been a lot of discussion about how we’re all working to similar goals here. True enough (see my response to Steven Levy below for more).

That said, Arrington doesn’t seem to be acting like he’s on the same team.

[…] How They Should Feel About It on Seattle 2.0 has some views from the Pacific Northwest community. Fretting, Asking, and Begging Isn’t a Plan on Liminal States has my perspectives, a lot of links and excerpts from the […]

I’m not sure Arrington’s first sentence is literally incorrect: “Success in Silicon Valley, most would agree, is more merit driven than almost any other place in the world.”

The key is “MORE merit driven.” If it’s 35% fair in the Valley and 20% fair in the population at large, then his statement is true… as far as it goes, which isn’t very far.

But 35% fair — or you make up a number — isn’t fair; it’s just fairER than other places. The tech world has made progress, but I think it’s a mistake to say “we’re there,” or “this is as good as it’s gonna get,” or “it must be the fault of the women that they’re not better represented at the top.” Tech folks pride themselves on their ability to spot problems and pitch in as a team to fix them.

Well, it’s still a problem, and it’s a team problem that can be fixed only by pulling together, not by fiat or complaint or ignore-it-and-it-will-go-away.

Hispanics and blacks made up a smaller share of the valley’s computer workers in 2008 than they did in 2000, a Mercury News review of federal data shows, even as their share grew across the nation. Women in computer-related occupations saw declines around the country, but they are an even smaller proportion of the work force here.

The trend is striking in a region where Hispanics are nearly one-quarter of the working-age population — five times their percentage of the computer work force — and when dual-career couples and female MBAs are increasingly the norm.

That said, I really have no idea whether Silicon Valley is more or less meritocratic than elsewhere. Hmm. It’d be interesting for somebody to do an analysis as background for the all-woman discussion of women’s issues that Michael just announced is being added to TechCrunch Disrupt …

Speaking of which, a big huzzah to Michael and TechCrunch for doing this! As Steven says, it’s easier to fix the problem when people pull together. This session could a good step towards diversifying TechCrunch Disrupt. @navarrowwright, @nakisnakis, and randomdeanna all have some great suggestions, so it’s a huge opportunity.

And talk about perfect timing: on Tuesday, in It’s Time To Disqus Our Community, MG Siegler also a plan announced that TechCrunch is hiring a “social czar” whose job will include moderating the comments and more generally engaging the community. If that goes well, it could really cut down on the sexism (and racism and nativsm and ageism etc. etc.) in the comments and over time that can help make TechCrunch a much more diverse place.

In a lot of ways he is a supporter, and I can see why he feels that he doesn’t get enough credit. On the other hand, at least online, he comes across as uninformed on the broader diversity issues. A friend of mine commented “it’s like he truly doesn’t see the value of what you’re talking about… yet does see the value in the hirings he’s made.” He doesn’t seem to know much about structural oppression and intersectionality, and doesn’t care seem to care how his behavior lookstoothers.

Oh well. You take your allies as you find them. I’ve been impressed with his willingness to RT and engage with a lot of his critics. While there’s a lot we don’t agree on, we may well be on the same side here. I just wish he’d act that way.

[…] Lists, Women, and the Confluence Thereof Arrington is completely wrong about women in technology Fretting, asking, and begging isn’t a plan: a response to TechCrunch on women in technology Too Few Women in Tech: Stop Telling People How They Should Feel About It Blame Men — And […]

Here’s my problem. I would have preferred to see a post from Michael about what he learned from the experience. For example, while he doesn’t think there’s a real problem with women in tech, the comments he received on that post were direct and clear evidence of the problem and the small mindedness of some men in the business.

And Michelle Greer, whose comments on Arrington’s first post attracted a huge amount of abuse, says

You didn’t state, “Hey, I’m part of the solution.” You stated, “Don’t blame the men.” Like some sort of rallying cry. Then a bunch of your commenters demonstrated to you exactly WHY women are upset about this issue, and why men are blamed. I am not, by nature, illogical, bad at math, a poor leader, or a c**t. I am a human being. Just because YOU don’t think these attitudes and YOU are not actually to blame, it doesn’t mean that actually addressing these attitudes is somehow pandering to a crowd.

Indeed.

But as I said above, words aren’t the only kind of action — and we’re actually on the same side on this issue. Here’s Rachel Sklar’s summary on Change the Ratio (1, 2).

I think Arrington’s various posts have done an amazing job of bringing people of all views out of the woodwork … and making this issue impossible to ignore (which was the crux of my comment to the WSJ in the first place)….

This issue has gotten a huge blast of oxygen thanks to his post, and will get more thanks to this decisive follow-up. Glad this is a happenin’ topic. Yeah, I said happenin’.

So yeah, ratio = changing. That’s pretty cool.

Yeah really. Kudos to Rachel, and to Shira Ovide of WSJ for her good choice of quotes!

And while I’m handing out kudos, props to Chiara Atik of Guest of a Guest, who wrote about TechStar New York’s ratio of 46 male mentors and only two women — and to David Tisch from TechStars for his quick when Cindy Gallop brought it up on Twitter. Yet another good outcome — and far less confrontational, too! More of this, please 🙂

The fall edition of TechCrunch Disrupt is fast approaching – less than three weeks to go before the conference kicks off on September 27th. As part of the New York event we held an overnight hackathon immediately beforehand, organized by hackers extraordinaire Daniel Raffel, Chad Dickerson, and Tarikh Korula, and it was, without a doubt, a smashing success…. Naturally, we’ll be doing this again at Disrupt San Francisco. We’ve got some great judges lined up, including Joshua Schachter, moot, and Dean Hovey. Tons of you have been emailing us asking when you could sign up for a slot – and we have good news:

Good news indeed! It sounds like a great event and very cool they’ve got the world’s most influential person as a judge. But wait a second, let’s just look at those underlined names again. I’m noticing a pattern here — and the picture emphasizes it.

Still, especially combined with Michael Arrington’s earlier tweet about adding a panel on “women’s issues” to TechCrunch Disrupt there is an awesome opportunity here. Add a bunch of women judges so that the panel is mostly female. Seek out some well-known female hackers and comp them. Partner with organizations like NCWIT, Anita Borg Instititue, Linux Chix, She’s Geeky, Blog Her, Women Who Tech, Pipeline Women, Astia, Women 2.0, etc. to promote the heck out of it — and find some sponsors to kick in scholarships. Etc. etc.

And then do similar things with other dimensions of diversity as well.

So the stage is set for a brilliant n-dimensional [literally!] chess move by Michael’s boss, TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde — who is conveniently enough on a panel at next week’s Women Who Tech telesummit. Kind of like a 21st century “Nixon goes to China”. Who knows, maybe this is exactly how they’ve planned it all along, they’ve got stuff like this in the works already, and they’re just keeping it quiet. We shall see.

Thanks for the comment, Liz. Yeah, historically very few startups have paid attention to diversity. It’s too bad, because it’s a lot easier to deal with if you build it in up front; accidental biases in your early employee and community base can become more and more self-reinforcing over time. Then again a lot of startups also have historically underinvested in security and privacy and software engineering and a lot of other things you should do up front. It’s tough when resources are so constrained, and I think most people people miss the huge value diversity starts to bring relatively quickly.

Hope you decide to post about it! If you do, please leave a link it in the link list thread. Thanks!

Barely a day goes past without a (usually anonymous) troll in the comments section criticising TechCrunch for deleting their abusive, inaccurate, trollish comment on the basis that we’re attacking their “right to free speech”.

And it’s not limited to TechCrunch: the story is similar across much of the Internet. Take this post by Michelle Greer, on her blog. Michelle is a TechCrunch reader who was subject to a barrage of abuse – largely focussing on her gender – when she wrote a comment on Mike’s post about female entrepreneurs. The post itself makes disheartening reading, but its the comments that made me so frustrated I wanted to punch the screen.

One particularly ignorant dick of a commenter accused Greer of wanting to “ban all free speech for men” while a more measured response suggested that “freedom of speech has limits”.

From the comments:

And i thought this was a good point too:

Recently however more and more TechCrunch posts talk about things that have less to do with technologies or VCs, and more to do with people. Politics, ethics, diversity… you name it.

It’s hard to say whether this scope broadening is intentional or not, but I’m sure Michael and his staff know very well what it leads to: more discussions and more emotions. Which means you can potentially get more traffic, but lose some otherwise loyal readers. And one thing you may lose or at least affect on the way is your brand..

Indeed. From a strategy perspective TechCrunch as well as Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, Gizmodo, Engadget, Wired, and a lot of others have all been fighting over the same “techie white male” demographic. How to broaden their appeal without losing their base? Hiring more women as executives, editors, and writers, and inviting diversity-oriented guest posts (like Vivek Wadwha’s on TechCrunch and Jessica Faye Carter’s on Mashable) have been good first steps. At some point somebody’s going to make the next move in the n-dimensional chess game.

Based on statistics she learned at the World Economic Forum’s invitation-only “Summer Davos” (more about which below), she argues that women in tech in the US have it better than anywhere else so shouldn’t discuss it any further until somebody proves there’s a problem.

Guess what? Statistically, there are far fewer women who suffer from sexual assault in the U.S. than in South Africa – gee, I guess that means we shouldn’t complain and shouldn’t work as hard on this issue – we have it so much better. Is this a harsh comparison? Absolutely – but an effective one, I think. Just because we have more women in positions ready to move up doesn’t mean they’ll be able to shoot up that ladder.

Okay so am I crazy or does this sound like Lacy is agreeing with the central thesis of Change The Ratio and the like? I have used that word “lopsided” so many times when discussing the male-female ratio (ratios like this and this and this and this and this and this and yes this) and the WSJ article that kicked this whole thing off was about different groups which had identified the problem and were taking action toward a solution. (As a side note, it’s funny how little that original article is returned to. Guess it’s easier to dismiss that action as “complaining”).

Sarah describes bloggers suggesting that gender equity needs attention as “playing to a crowd or just haven’t been doing their homework”. Presumably she’s referring to Rachel here, as well as Caroline Simard of the Anita Borg Institute, whose Saying High-Tech is a Meritocracy Doesn’t Make it So in the Huffington Post has links to the exactly kind of data Sarah’s asking for. It’s hard to know how broadly she means it, actually. Is she also attacking Allyson Kapin of Women Who Tech, Sharon Vosmek of Astia, Read Write Web columnist Audrey Watters, Natalia Oberti Noguera of Pipeline, Iris Camron of Jezebel, super-angel Brad Feld, VC Fred Wilson, TechCrunch’s own Vivek Wadhwa, and all the other women and men who have blogged and written about this?

The picture on the right is from the web page for World Economic Forum’s “Summer Davos”, the invitation-only meeting Sarah Lacy discussed in her Women in Tech: Look around the World and Stop Complaining. The Annual Meeting of the New Champions, as it is more formally known, is the Tianjin-based little sibling of the WEF’s annual meeting in Davos Switzerland, a place where the global elite meet, learn, network, and share plans for world domination. Attendees include CEOs, CTOs, chief economists, corporate strategists, heads of government, ministers for energy, science and industry, scientists from around the world, publishers, editors-in-chief, and top columnists.

While this thread is mostly about TechCrunch, can we just digress a moment into the multiple #diversityfails by the World Economic Forum? Let’s start with the picture. The nine superstar mentors listed on the page include Kris Gopalakrishnan, Jack Ma Yun, Wei Jiafu, and Hari S. Barthia, and to my untrained Western eye the partial attendees list seems rather unsurprisingly mostly Chinese and Indian. In the picture, though, it’s white guys in focus up front, everybody else in the background.

And, um, where are the women? Not just in the picture, but also the mentors, where it’s Cynthia Carroll and eight guys for a ratio of 11% — and no women of color.

The term “kerfuffle” came up a few times in Wednesday’s perfectly-timed Women Who Tech TeleSummit, and so did issues of representation. A few examples:

Jill Foster and TeleSummit organizer Allyson Kapin kicked it off with a discussion of representation at conferences

Shireen Mitchell and Liza Sabater followed with a great discussion of “open diversity” and innovation.

On the “Women and Open Source” panel, Sarah Mei of Pivotal Labs described how the SF Ruby community has increased participation by women from 2% to 18% and Kaliya Hamlin (@identitywoman) talked about the role of open standards.

Mary Hodder and Lynne d Johnson rocked the panel on gender and self-promotion. Lynne recounted how SXSW addressed diversity starting in 2005 with focused panels and a top-down directive. Mary told a great story of how after doing the definitive preview of the field for a blog as a guest-poster, she still wasn’t invited to present at the conference they were running because she wasn’t seen as enough of a rockstar. And so much more …

TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde was on one of the closing panels. Moderator Cathy Brooks’ Moving Forward, Seizing the future had set the tone: women are underrepresented, it’s not really a problem, continually talking about chauvism and misogyny is a waste time, and “PLEASE stop complaining and just start doing the work”.* She struck a similar for the panel. A few excerpts from the Twitter stream give an idea of what Heather covered:

All true — and there were some a very pragmatic suggestions as well, including acting classes and/or improv comedy to reduce flappability. On the intern front, when Michael posted about TechCrunch’s all-male intern class of 2008, he also mentioned in passing that they hired a couple of guys from their 2007 intern crop. I don’t think Heather gave the current numbers but props to TechCrunch if they’ve now got a balanced gender ratio.

And what about women who are already adults and for whatever reason didn’t get those opportunities at an early age? Focusing on girls is vital for a long-term solution; focusing primarily on girls entrenches the advantages of adult guys and the relatively-few women who have been good, lucky, and privileged enough to succeed in the current system.

jon

* As I said earlier in the thread, I don’t see challenging under-representation as complaining, and believe you me it is a lot of work.

Tarikh Korula’s 7 Reasons Why You Need to Hack at TechCrunch Disrupt makes a compelling case. Admission is free if you’re selected and you can network with the judges: Brett Bullington, Bradley Horowitz, Dean Hovey, Michael Marquez, Christopher Poole, Joshua Schachter, Mike Schroepfer, and Cyan Banister, the founder of Zivity who according to Arrington thinks “women [stink] as entrepreneurs a lot of the time because they are nurturing and not risk-taking enough by nature.”

Barry Diller is the consummate player, as evidenced by the fact that he parks wherever the hell he wants to—even in the middle of Times Square. We’ll have a spot reserved for him when he comes to Disrupt in San Francisco… He will join our other speakers, including John Doerr, Mark Pincus, Mike Moritz, Reid Hoffman, Marissa Mayer, Chris Sacca, Dave McClure, Peter Thiel, and David Sacks.

Just have to chime in on one thing … I’ve been thinking about Cyan Banister’s comment about women entrepreneur and how being nurturing is a bad thing in her mind. I think she’s being both short sighted and frankly silly … there’s no reason one cannot be nurturing AND be okay with risk … if by nurturing she means not firing someone who’s not doing the work they need to do, or not making a move because they’re afraid of hurting someone’s feelings … that’s not nurturing. Frankly I think that working in a high stress, high paced start-up environment with a leader who actually gives a shit how people are doing is nothing but an asset – so long as that caring doesn’t stand in the way of making clear-headed business decisions.

Just wanted to re-post what I felt was my most important post-event tweet — building on the quote from Heather Harde (“Best motivation and reinforcement you can get is leadership opportunities at a young age”) shown above:

We also have this article from Mike Cassidy in the SV Mercury News today: “Let’s keep talking about venture funding for women” (http://is.gd/fibiw). Jed Katz says that women-owned firms comprise 20% of Javelin Venture Partners, the highest percentage he’s seen in 6 years.

Easier said than done, of course, as a couple Twitter comments during the WWT panels point out:

Women tend to have fewer resources then male entrepeneurs, the risks really are higher for them. Like education, this is another one of those aspects of the problem where solutions will only happen in the long term — although as the AAUW reminds us, passing the Paycheck Fairness Act is a good next step.

Vivek says that as well as discussing the dearth of women in technology, he’ll also ask Michael about advice for students on education, entrepreneurship, career, dealing with ethics situations, and Silicon Valley.

It would be great if Michael could talk about internships, which is particularly relevant to college students. What advice does he have for students seeking internships? And Heather Harde made a great point last week about internships as a key way of helping the pipleline; I’m curious what TechCrunch has done differently since their all-male intern class of 2008 and what results they’ve seen.

And Tereza Nemessanyi’s got a good suggestion too:

I’m not sure about the time or hashtag yet — I’ll update this once I know. In the interim …

Twenty five new startups will battle for a $50,000 cash prize and the (recently defiled) Disrupt Cup. And when those companies aren’t fighting it over over several rounds of demos, we’ll have world class speakers take the stage to talk about what’s next in tech. Sequoia’s Michael. Kleiner Perkin’s John. IAC’s Barry. HP’s Todd. Digg’s Kevin. Google’s Marissa and Bradley. Reid, David. Ron. Peter. Dan. And more. The list goes on and on.

Indeed it does! I’ll do a preview post soon, but here’s some quick impressions …

Day 1 of TechCrunch Disrupt, it’s currently Beth Comstock of GE and twelve guys (8% women). If you look at it in terms of time, it’s even worse: Beth’s sharing the 20-minute “Cultures of Innovation” slot with Intuit’s Scott Cook. So it looks like about three hours of guys talking and 10 minutes of women. Sigh. Anyhow, it should be interesting to hear John interviewing his partner Bing and Zynga’s Mark (TechCrunch’s CEO of the year) about building internet treasures. I wonder if they’ll talk about Peter Jamison’s recent SF Weekly article FarmVillains?

Day 2 is up to 27% women, thanks to the all-female panel on “Women in Tech” discussion that was added as a result of the kerfuffle. I don’t know much about the panelists — Lauren Leto of Texts from Last Night and Bntr, Leila Chirayath Janah of non-profit Samasource, Sara Chipps of Girl Developer, and Zivity’s Cyan Banister — but it looks interesting. During last weeks Women Who Tech TeleSummit, Lynne d Johnson was talking about the important role the 2005 SXSW “Blogging while Black” panel played, and hopefully one day we’ll look back on this similarly. More about this panel soon.

The rest of the day, though, is all-male. Deanna Zandt’s tweet on the left, after Michael first announced the panel a few weeks ago on Twitter, highlights the missed. Why not add a woman to the “Design vs. Engineering” panel currently featuring Bradley from Google, by Mike from Facebook, Jason from Twitter, and Charlie from Quora. No disrespect to any of them, but not only are they all guys, but their companies’ design and engineering approaches are relatively similar; it would be a much more interesting discussion with a broader range of perspectives. Heck, they could even go crazy and add a female designer and a female engineer. Now that would be awesome.

Day 3 is back down to 17% women, with Christy Wyatt of Motorola on a panel about mobile apps and e-commerce and Marissa Mayer of Google doing a product introduction and then judging the closing panel. Y’know, Marissa would be a great addition to any of the other panels, or subject for a Fireside Chat. It’s really a shame that her only appearances are pitching product and judging others. Oh well.

For what it’s worth, GE, Motorola, and Google are all listed as “partner sponsors” for the conference, so presumably they got to choose who was speaking. Props to them for choosing at least one woman. And there’s an interesting pattern: all the women speakers at the conference are either from partner sponsors or talking about “women’s issues”.

Today’s the last day for early-bird tickets, a steal at $1995. Tomorrow the price goes up to $2995. Admission includes three “conference badge required for admission” afterparties, including one with special entertainment by MC Hammer at 1015 Folsom. Here’s a couple comments from TechCrunch:

Melody Akhtari (whose Twitter bio is “Web TV revolutionary soldier!!! Boxee marketing. Girls in Tech Board of Directors. Student at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. In that order”) did a great job of tweeting Michael Arrington’s appearance at Vivek Wadhwa’s Berkeley class — and took the pic on the right, too.

Here’s a few highlights from the tweetstream:

Vivek certainly had some good opportunities to get punches in. He might have pointed out that while encouraging girls to get and stay involved in technology is vital, focusing only on the next generation reinforces the advantages of currently-successful guys (and the women who have succeeded in this system). It also would have been great if he had reminded the students about all the evidence he and others have presented about the different kinds of discrimination against women, and asked them why they thought it was so hard for Michael to see it. Oh well, maybe the format wasn’t right for either of those … hopefully he’ll cover it in their next class.

Anyhow, great discussion. Thanks again to Melody and others for tweeting!

[…] Still, what a great lead-in to TechCrunch Disrupt! As well as a Super Angel vs. VC smackdown with several of these guys, there are also fireside chats with several male investors and an all-woman panel on women in technology. […]

The comments aren’t all that bad by TechCrunch standards. There’s a couple of clueless guys going on at length, but Carla Thompson of women-focused Q&A site Sharp Skirts (who used to work for Chris Shipley putting on the DEMO conference) fights the good fight, gets reinforcements from Julie Gomoll, Michelle Greer, Tina Cannon, and K. Warman Kern.

AJoyner has a great response to a guy trotting out the tired chestnut that “you can’t solve discrimination with more discrimination”:

This is the standard line thrown out whenever a minority group, whether women in tech or racial minorities in the U.S., seek to build support networks of their own. It’s like anything that doesn’t have white men at its core is somehow wrong or invalid. Why is it so hard to accept that not every thing is about you? There may very well be issues that entrepreneurial-minded women need to work out among themselves…including the assertion you make that most women aren’t inclined toward start-ups. It’s pretty contradictory to bash women tech entrepreneurs for crying “discrimination” but berate them for being proactive by building their own communities.

Well said.

Cyan Bannister, who’s on the Women in Tech panel at TechCrunch, helpfully criticizes the whole idea of women’s only-events. Way to support your fellow woman entrenpreneurs, Cyan!* More positively, K. Warman Kern brings up an excellent point:

Everyone is targeting Men under 30. No one is targeting Women with experience who are, as someone pointed out above, starting over half of new businesses every year.

Yeah, really. And I think I’ll give Carla and SharpSkirts get the last word here:

With the news this week that the recession officially ended in June 2009, there’s a ton of commentary about how it still feels like we’re in recession. But from where I sit, it never felt much like a recession at all. Revenues tightened up and people didn’t get raises, but I don’t know any friends who lost apartments, few who lost jobs and few companies that went under, just because of the crash….

My point: Stop whining.

Then again I can see Shelley’s point too. While a lot of the comments in Michael’s rant (especially from guys) agreed with him that women should stop blaming men, there were a heck of a lot of responses elsewhere. Hmm, hard to know. I can see arguments both ways. I guess they’re both right.

Meanwhile, Michael alleged a conspiracy by Silicon Valley angels and a huge controversy erupted involving several TechCrunch Disrupt speakers and some excellent promotion of Quora, as well as a lot of guys linking to each other. Angelgate: Collusion’s such an ugly word has more, along with some observations by Dare’s former colleague Robert.

In venture capital, there are three people who rule Silicon Valley: John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins, Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital, and Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures. All three will be speaking at Disrupt. (There are still a few tickets left). We’ve already mentioned Doerr and Moritz, and now we are pleased to announce that Khosla will be completing the triumvirate.

[…] the last few weeks, I’ve been blogging about Rachel, Michelle, and Cyan in Fretting, asking, and begging isn’t a plan. So now’s a great time to take a quick look back at the kerfuffle that leading to this […]

[…] The criteria that leads TED curators and Tech Conference organizers to put mostly white men on stage can reflect outright outright gender bias (e.g., we prefer men, we think men are smarter) or indirect gender bias (e.g., theories that women promote are less interesting than the ones men promote), but in the end, it’s gender bias. It is criteria that goes beyond merit, and reflects the curators’ judgements. […]

[…] The criteria that leads TED curators and Tech Conference organizers to put mostly white men on stage can reflect outright outright gender bias (e.g., we prefer men, we think men are smarter) or indirect gender bias (e.g., theories that women promote are less interesting than the ones men promote), but in the end, it’s gender bias. It is criteria that goes beyond merit, and reflects the curators’ judgments. […]

[…] year’s TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco took place in the aftermath of the the Arrington Kerfuffle and Angelgate, and wound up with AOL acquiring TechCrunch. This year, it’s in the midst of […]